Adventus

By Pepper Ckua

On the first day of Christmas, his true love gives him guitar strings.

Starsky goes to that hippie place on Pico, the one that sells the psychedelic posters, black lights, and strange things in metal boxes. The Electric Mayhem also has a little section of guitar strings and picks on the rack by the hookahs. Starsky wonders if there’s some sort of drug thing guitar strings are used for, but he can’t think of what. In any case, it’s within walking distance of Mr. Muffin and makes for an easy stop.

Guitar strings in hand, Starsky realizes he’s been holding his breath in a vain attempt to keep the smoke from stale Colombians and clove cigarettes from making too much of a home in his lungs.

Starsky loves the sound of Hutch’s voice when he sings almost as much as he loves the pattern Hutch’s fingers make as they move across the strings and the sound hole. It makes Starsky think of the possibility of hands in other places he wishes Hutch would touch.

XXXXXXXX

On the second day of Christmas, his true love gives him six spools of black thread, a small bag with miniature brass rings, and a tiny pot of gold paint. Hutch knows Starsky is working on a model of the Bounty and has a desire to rock the boat.

Hutch likes to sit while his partner fiddles with the tiny brushes, the toothpicks tipped with glue and an intense look on his face. Hutch imagines it’s the look Starsky would have on his face if his partner ever leaned down over him in bed and said, “Let me take you there. Let me catch you.” Looking over at his face now, Hutch watches Starsky stepping the bowsprit and running the linen thread up the mast, his eyes dark with concentration.

When Starsky looks up and asks Hutch to pass him the number six razor with the curved point, Hutch has to think for a moment before he puts his hand down to the flannel pad between them.

XXXXXXXX

On the third day of Christmas, his true love gives him a Wilson Enforcer NFL Official All-Leather ball. He likes the way it smells. It reminds him of the winter gloves his father wore.

Starsky thinks back to a stakeout, one of the long nights sitting in front of Simon Marcus’s storefront chapel. He remembers Hutch regaling him with the story of a Hutchinson family Thanksgiving tradition, a planned, impromptu football game in the back yard. Hutch said it was not unlike the Kennedys at Hyannisport, running back and forth on the brown grass and smiling for the cameras.

Hutch had remarked that Duluth was a long way from Massachusetts in terms of distance but in terms of overbearing, perfectionist fathers, not so much.

During that stakeout, Hutch had recalled his embarrassment of watching his father run across the yard, and of his fear that his two uncles would take childhood hurts to heart and tackle each other hard enough to mean it.

Hutch had been afraid his brother, Arne, would finally have enough of all this shit, throw the ball too far in the air and tell everyone what he and Hutch really, really thought.

Or at least what Arne thought Hutch thought.

Hutch had said it was only the image of his mother and aunts watching from the patio, shivering in the November air with their mai tais in hand, that made him suck it in and do the right thing.

Or the wrong thing, as usual.

Starsky thinks it’s certainly a sign of true love that a rabid baseball fan is giving his best buddy a football as a gift.

He ties an awkward bow around the ball and puts it on Hutch’s coffee table.

When Kiko comes over for supper that weekend, he and Hutch take the football up to Emerson Park and toss it around.

Starsky spends the time they’re gone paying bills and making a grocery list. It’s enough to make him feel like a housewife. He’d scowl if there were anyone there to see it.

When Kiko and Hutch come in through the back door, full of bravado and tales of close calls, Starsky suggests popcorn. They end up eating Space Food Sticks, drinking too-strong Tang and opening up the windows in an attempt to get the smell of burnt popcorn out of the apartment.

XXXXXXXX

On the fourth day of Christmas, his true love gives him a new set of chess pieces. He doesn’t replace the board, a cheap, cardboard thing that’s warped by beer. It has too many memories.

He gets out the new pieces and sets them up for an immediate game.

The pieces are hard and cold and marble. Hutch likes the heft of them in his hand; it makes losing nearly every game to his partner just a little bit easier.

XXXXXXX

On the fifth day of Christmas, his true love gives him a long-sleeved, orangey-red shirt.

The first time he wears it is the night he spills Ragu down the front of his white sweater. Hutch rolls his eyes and suggests a bib. Hutch walks to the bathroom, reaches into the hamper and hands him the orangey-red shirt instead.

Starsky loves the way it smells of gun oil, a bit of Bay City smog, leather and the unique scent that is his partner.

It’s a piece of clothing that he intends to borrow as often as possible.

Over the next few years, Starsky does whatever he can, whenever he can, to get that shirt back. Careless food handling at taco stands, periodic falls in the bay, and that incident Hutch thinks was entirely an accident, the vomit of a washed-out loser named Fester, were just a few of his successes.

Sometimes, it’s all just good enough.

XXXXXXXX

On the sixth day of Christmas, his true love gives him a new set of Monopoly pieces.

Over the years, some of the original game pieces have disappeared.

Molly Bower, the girlfriend with kleptomania, had stolen the Scottie dog. She’d walked off with it and strange collection of Starsky’s things. The last night he’d slept over at her place, he’d discovered her cache. He’d been padding about in her kitchenette, looking for a drinking glass. Instead he found a small basket heaped with little items: his toothbrush, two forks, the lens cap to his camera and the empty keychain he got from the bank.

When Starsky tells Hutch about this unnerving discovery, Hutch replies, “Maybe it’s her name that makes her do this weird thing?”

“Molly?”

“No, Bower.”

Starsky has to think for a while to make the connection. Then he realizes Hutch’s infatuation with "Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom" is flavoring his partner’s view of human behavior in ways that just might not be healthy.

At lunch the next day, Starsky says, “It’s only the male bird that does that, you know.”

Hutch looks up from his yogurt, raises an eyebrow and replies, “Maybe you didn’t know Molly as well as you thought you did.”

“Yeah, and maybe Marlin Perkins doesn’t know everything either.”

Hutch just shrugs.

But Starsky knows his partner is right. He’s also reminded of how much he hates it when Hutch talks with his mouth full.

As for the other disappearing Monopoly pieces, the horse and thimble are lost when Fifi drinks too much coffee and vacuums for what Hutch thinks must have been six hours straight.

The wheelchair, the battleship, and the race car had disappeared after a two-bit nickel-and-dimer busted into Hutch’s apartment and made the place look like a scene out of Helter Skelter.

The top hat and the silver shoe were lost one miserable, wonderful night when too much Coors preceded too much whiskey, and both fueled Terry’s unofficial memorial service.

The first thing Hutch saw when he’d woken up the next morning in bed was Starsky stretched out beside him.

Hutch tried to remember how much of the night had been real and how much was a dream.

Staggering to the kitchen, he saw the pink, green and yellow money and bits of candle wax scattered on the linoleum.

Hutch got a drink of water and curled up on the couch.

Starsky was making coffee when Hutch awoke. Starsky handed him a cup and said, “I did some cleaning up.”

Hutch knew from the headache just behind his eyes and the uncertain look on Starsky’s face that something beyond buying utilities had happened the night before.

Hutch also had a feeling it was Venice Place, not Park Place, that had a claim staked to it now.

XXXXXXXX

On the seventh day of Christmas, his true love decides to try hard to say only nice things.

He lets Starsky choose the place for lunch. He offers to type the reports. And he takes the bad cop role in their interrogation of smart-mouthed Bobby Brando.

Hutch decides from the look on his partner’s face that this might not be as much a gift as he’s intended.

“Something wrong, buddy?” Starsky asks, giving him a sidelong glance. “You missin’ someone?”

Hutch doesn’t answer.

Two days before the eighth day of Christmas, Starsky is elated to hear that Huggy has finally tracked down the autographed copy of the Buddy Holly album.

Starsky thinks it’s a stroke of genius that he gives it to Hutch in a pizza box.

It sort of makes up for the stroke he thought Hutch was going to have when he’d smelled the odor of plastic coming out of the vent on the back of his stove.

XXXXXXXX

On the ninth day of Christmas, Hutch receives a box of photos from Starsky’s ma.

She’d called Hutch two weeks before, her voice heavy with smoke and cancer, and told him she was sending something his way.

“It’s a box of photos I found in the back of the closet in the spare bedroom,” she said, rasping and hesitating. Hutch could almost see the slightly yellow air in her apartment. “I thought this stuff was long gone, maybe tossed out after Michael was …after Michael died. I want David to have it, but I don’t want him to look at them alone. So I’m sending them to you.”

Sitting on Starsky’s couch, they look at photographs of Starsky and his dad at a baseball game.

“That’s the game Eckworth made two in-the-park home runs,” Starsky says. The black and white photograph shows a grinning Starsky, his dad’s arm around his shoulder.

They look at the photograph of a young Starsky and his brother standing on the stoop of the apartment on 85th Street. Nicky looks sneaky. Starsky looks sneakier.

“Laura Anderson took that picture. And she took this one, too.” Starsky shows Hutch another black and white square. It’s of Starsky and his mom getting out of a green and black Kaiser Frazer. Starsky was wearing a baseball cap, and his mother had a cigarette between her long fingers.

“Love the hat, Starsk. It makes you look like a little Babe Ruth.”

Starsky just smiles.

When Hutch gets up to answer the phone, he comes back to find Starsky’s replaced the lid on the box. It’s sitting on the floor next to the couch.

“Maybe I’ll look at some more later. I think I’m gonna head out. Remember, you’re drivin' tomorrow.”

“You all right, buddy?” Hutch asks. He knows Starsky knows what he’s really asking. And Starsky’s answer is what they both expect.

“You mean because I’m not complainin’ about doing that stakeout for the Feds in your dump of a car?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

XXXXXXXX

On the tenth day of Christmas, his true love calls Duluth.

He waits until nine o’clock when the rates go down.

“Mrs. Hutchinson. David Starsky here.”

“David who?”

“Starsky. Ken’s partner.”

“Is something wrong? Is he okay?” Her voice sounds slurred, like it’s coming from inside a bottle of Wild Turkey.

“Ken’s fine. What I’m calling you about is to ask if you have a recipe for something you used to make for supper, something Ken would remember from his childhood.”

There was a long silence. Starsky could hear the clink of a glass against something.

“David,” Hutch’s mom says, her voice slow. “You want to know the honest truth?”

Starsky wonders if this would be a bad time to beg off on a wrong number and hang up the phone. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember he called.

“Sure,” he says bravely instead.

“You gotta unnerstan…understand that when Kenneth was growing up, I was drinking too much. I mean way too much. I don’t even remember what it was I put on the dining room table.”

There was another pause and another click of glass.

“Losing Arne was bad. Having one son killed in a goddamn, stupid war is bad enough. Having your goddamn, stupid husband leave you is worse.”

Starsky doesn’t think he agrees but wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“I hope Kenneth forgives me someday. Maybe it’ll be at same time I forgive myself. Hell, it might even be on the same day.”

Starsky is astounded. He thinks it takes a whole lot of guts to say what she is saying. Either that or alcohol. He also wonders if she has been reading some of those self-help books, and everything is all mixed up in her head.

“I know Kenneth always liked hamburger hot dish. I’ll tell ya …I’ll tell ya how to make it. Not on the telephone, not with …what Ma Bell charges. Tell me your address again.”

It takes her a full six minutes to find a pencil. Starsky thinks she could have told him the recipe over the phone in less time than that. He hears her knock over something, and he worries.

The recipe arrives a week later and is surprisingly coherent.

On Saturday night, Starsky serves supper up with a flourish.

Hutch looks down at his plate, and Starsky can see the muscles in his jaw twitch.

“I called your ma,” Starsky says. “I asked her what she used to make that you liked, you know, when you were a kid. She calls this 'Hutchinson Hot Dish', sorry no movie stars invoked.”

Hutch picks up his fork.

Then he puts it down, pushes his plate back and goes over to sit on the couch.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice deep and rough. “I don’t know why a plate of rice, hamburger, condensed soup, and canned peas can do this to me.”

Starsky says he thinks he knows why, and it isn’t the waste of a pound of ground chuck. That gets a little smile out of Hutch.

Later, over a delivered pizza, Hutch paints a picture of the years after his brother died and his father left. It’s a portrait of confusion, misery and desperation.

Starsky says he understands, but in the end he isn’t sure he does. This makes him feel bad.

He offers to share his own mom with Hutch, remembering seconds only after the words leave his mouth that his ma died the year before.

The next weekend he makes Hutch the 'Paul Muni Special'. He serves it with those little breadsticks you make that come out of the can you hit against the kitchen counter.

He suggests Hutch telephone his mom and offers to pay the long-distance phone charge.

Hutch makes that call. It’s an ugly, wonderful, cathartic thing. As soon as the phone call ends, he collapses into bed with his shoes on. Starsky throws a blanket over him.

Sitting in the living room, Starsky feels like finishing off the scotch he knows is underneath the kitchen sink. He thinks about Hutch’s mom and decides to get himself a glass of milk instead.

The next morning, Hutch thanks him. He doesn’t actually say it, but he lets Starsky drive all week.

Hutch gets a call from Duluth ten months later. He hangs up the phone and says in a low, gruff voice that he’s got a trip to make his final trip to Minnesota.

They come back from the funeral with a recipe they’d found on Hutch’s mom’s refrigerator. The card is yellowed and has one corner ripped off.

Hutch’s mom’s scrawl on the front says, “Applesauce Cake, Kenny’s favorite.”

Starsky is amused to see a grocery list on the backside of the card. “Jesus,” he says. “Wonder bread, cod, bananas, rice, cream, eggs, whole milk, Cool Whip, vanilla wafers, cheese, powdered sugar? No wonder you’re such a white boy.”

Hutch uses the recipe to make the applesauce cake and finds he doesn’t remember ever eating it before.

XXXXXXXX

On the eleventh day of Christmas, his true love gives him four new Ford floor mats and a package of calf-length tube socks.

He puts them in the back seat of the Torino and wonders how long it will be before Starsky notices them.

After getting in the car, it takes his partner less than a minute.

“I smell fresh rubber.” Starsky’s nose twitches as he slides into the front seat. “Did someone get me a present?”

XXXXXXXX

On the twelfth day of Christmas, his true love is kissing him under a bunch of wilted parsley hung over the bedroom door.

“I gotta tell you, I’ve wanted to get my hands in your bullpen for years now, and here I am, doing just that.”

“Nobody ever said you weren’t a romantic, buddy. But parsley?”

“It’s the poor man’s mistletoe, pal.”

Later, he reaches for his shirt and finds it’s gotten shoved a little too far between the bed and the wall. As he tugs it out, there’s a metallic sound of something hitting the bedside table.

He pulls on his shirt and looks down at his sleeping partner. Starsky’s jaw’s darkened by stubble, his mouth’s slightly open, and he’s softly snoring. Hutch lays his hand on Starsky’s chest and feels the heartbeat there.

Then he looks at the table next to them.

Lying there is a tiny metal top hat and a silver shoe. He thinks back to the night they lit candles for Terry, and how what happened was really only one piece of the puzzle.

He picks both pieces up and holds them hard enough to make a dent in the palm of his hand.

All those years, and they weren’t underneath the refrigerator after all.

They were right here.